An award-winning and highly distinguished documentary film-maker, Leslie Woodhead has written a funny, sad and highly atmospheric memoir of what it was like to be hurled into maturity amidst the peculiar circumstances of the Cold War. In the spring of 1956, like two million other men of his generation, the eighteen-year old Leslie Woodhead received a summons to serve Her Majesty. Charting his progress from the austerity of post-war Halifax, via comically bleak RAF training camps and the grim, isolated Joint Services School for Linguistics, "My Life As A Spy" takes us finally to Berlin and the front line of the Cold War. In the ruins of a city gripped by espionage and paranoia, Leslie Woodhead discovered adulthood and his vocation as an observer and documenter of people. A slice of Cold War history and a poignant tale of how our lives can be formed by events and experiences we barely comprehend at the time. '[a] delightfully irreverent memoir...Woodhead's memories exude a wonderful sense of nostalgia for a world of lost innocence that to anyone over 60 is instantly recognisable' - "Sunday Times".

My Life As a Spy

Biographies & Memoirs

Woodhead, Leslie

Leaders & Notable People

Pan Books, Ltd.

Fabulous first-person travels from the point of view of an artist / film-maker who travels throughout the continent of Africa.

A box full of spirits: Adventures of a film-maker in Africa

Travel

Travel Writing

Heinemann

An only child, living above a shop in post-war Halifax, Woodhead grew up with austerity and secrets. But nothing prepared him for the comically bleak RAF National Service training camps he now found himself in, nor the isolated Joint Services School for Linguistics on the East coast of Scotland. Here he was taught Russian, before being posted to an ex-Luftwaffe base in a war-scarred Berlin. In the ruins of a city gripped by espionage and paranoia, he discovers adulthood and his vocation as an observer and documenter of people.

My Life As A Spy (Ulverscroft Large Print Series)

Isis Large Print

My Life As A Spy

True Crime

This wry and poignant literary memoir follows the adventures of a young lad from Halifax as he is put through grim RAF National Service training camps and Russian language schools before being despatched to an inhospitable, cold-war Berlin on a pointless tour of duty. A hugely evocative tale of coming of age in post-war Britain, and a wry take on one young man's reluctant and eventually absurd role spying for her Majesty.

My Life as a Spy

Macmillan, UK

The music of the Beatles played a part in waking up an entire generation of Soviet youth, opening their eyes to 70 years of bland official culture and rigid authoritarianism. Leslie Woodhead's 'How The Beatles Rocked the Kremlin' tells the unforgettable - and endearingly odd - story of Russians who discovered that all you need is the Beatles.

How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin

Arts & Photography

Music

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Imagine a world where Beatlemania was against the law-recordings scratched onto medical X-rays, merchant sailors bringing home contraband LPs, spotty broadcasts taped from western AM radio late in the night. This was no fantasy world populated by Blue Meanies but the USSR, where a vast nation of music fans risked repression to hear the defining band of the British Invasion. The music of John, Paul, George, and Ringo played a part in waking up an entire generation of Soviet youth, opening their eyes to seventy years of bland official culture and rigid authoritarianism. Soviet leaders had suppressed most Western popular music since the days of jazz, but the Beatles and the bands they inspired-both in the West and in Russia-battered down the walls of state culture. Leslie Woodhead's How The Beatles Rocked the Kremlin tells the unforgettable-and endearingly odd-story of Russians who discovered that all you need is Beatles. By stealth, by way of whispers, through the illicit late night broadcasts on Radio Luxembourg, the Soviet Beatles kids tuned in. "Bitles," they whispered, "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah."

How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin: The Untold Story of a Noisy Revolution

Arts & Literature

Bloomsbury USA

Documents the most remote peoples on earth, explores their rapidly changing ways of life, and assesses the impact of the industrialized world on these peoples, as revealed on the Granada Television series

Disappearing World

Politics & Social Sciences

Singer, Andre

Anthropology

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Books by Woodhead, Leslie